Apps & Software

What to Do When Your Kid's Online Rep Goes Awry

Dan Tynan has been writing about technology since Steve Ballmer had hair. He is a contributing editor for Family Circle, where he writes about the intersection of parenting and technology. Follow him on Twitter @tynanwrites or at his blog Hopeless Dork.

There was a time when "coming of age" meant you had to start pulling your own weight and taking care of your own stuff. These days it means being responsible for your own Internet reputation.

Case in point: My son is now a junior in high school. He’ll be applying for colleges in the fall and we’ll be putting a lot of pressure on him to get a job this summer. Which means that he, and his reputation, are now at the mercy of Google.

This is not a trivial thing. According to surveys by Kaplan Test Prep, about one in four college admissions officers routinely Google applicants (about the same number also check Facebook). Some 35% of them discovered something negative that hurt an applicant’s chances -– a number that has tripled over the last year.

I knew my son had spent enough time on the Internet to leave behind a digital footprint. My question was, what did it look like? So I started Googling him using various combinations of his name and the handful of digital alter egos I know he uses.

The results were mostly innocent enough stuff. A handful of articles my lovely and talented wife had written about our son for various publications. An adorable set of photos from his 10th birthday party she had posted to Flickr. An equally adorable YouTube video of him getting into a silly slap fight with his best friend in sixth grade. An About.me page his mom had created to promote his landscaping talents. His mostly empty Zinch profile.

He’d created a blog for a sixth grade school project, but it only had one entry. He’d created a fake website (for a fictional church) for a high school digital media class, but never completed it. He had one current Twitter account as well as an abandoned one. He had an old inactive MySpace account and a Facebook account he hardly ever uses any more.

And then — there it was — near the bottom of the first page of search results: The smoking gun.

About six months ago my son suffered … let’s call it a “youthful indiscretion,” which involved receiving a citation from the police. We’re not terribly concerned about it, he’s a great kid, and everybody screws up at some point, especially teenagers. But this indiscretion involved talking to a judge and taking certain steps to clear his name and seal his record. A year from now it will be like it never happened.

Except of course if it’s immortalized on Google, where it could live forever. It turns out a small local paper makes a point of publishing police citations on its website, regardless of the age of the person who was cited.

My son had also made certain unwise comments about a YouTube video that was topically related to the citation he received, which was on page three of the results. Taken together, these two hits could provide a persuasive yet utterly inaccurate view of him.

This was not good, but it wasn’t fatal either. I immediately contacted the publisher of that paper, explained the situation, and asked them to kindly remove his name from that page. Two days later they did. Unfortunately, my son’s name still showed up in the capsule description of that page within the search results and inside Google’s cached copy. I know it will eventually disappear, but I wanted to be rid of it now, so I followed Google’s ridiculously arcane process and asked them to expedite removal from the cache.

Needless to say, my son was not happy I’d been using Google to stalk him, especially in regards to some of his more “colorful” YouTube comments.

“How many comments did you look at?” he moaned. Enough, I said.

I explained to him that his reputation was now at stake, and that it was up to him to manage it intelligently. I pointed out some comments he’d made that showed him to be the smart and funny kid he truly is, and encouraged him to make more of those. And if he felt compelled to make some kind of snarky or angry comment online, could he please do it using a pseudonym?

He reluctantly agreed, showing about the same amount of enthusiasm as he does when we ask him to take out the trash and unload the dishwasher. But it’s a start.

My advice: Google your kids — early and often. You may be surprised or even appalled at what you find. But trust me, you want to be the one to find it first.

Have you had this conversation with your kids yet? Any tips on clearing an online reputation? Let us know in the comments.

This post is part of a series on the dilemmas of raising digital kids. We'd like to hear some of the parenting issues technology has raised for you. Please let us know in the comments, or on our Mashable Lifestyle Facebook page. You can also follow and tweet us @mashlifestyle.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.